The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission held a public meeting about the proposed PennEast pipeline in February at Northampton Community College's Lipkin Theatre.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission held a public meeting about the proposed PennEast pipeline in February at Northampton Community College's Lipkin Theatre. (Harry Fisher, MORNING CALL FIle PHoto)

Opinion: How Pennsylvania's environment is threatened

For much of the past decade, the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale gas formations has been employed by natural gas drilling companies in southwest and northeast Pennsylvania.

The industry has professed to police itself effectively, and when greater regulations were recently suggested, David Spigelmyer, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, chafed, saying, "These duplicative regulations … have the potential to create an enormous amount of operational disruption without providing any meaningful environmental benefits."

On a parallel track, drillers are fighting mightily against the regulation of emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that could easily undo the benefits of the coal-to-gas switch currently powering Pennsylvania. The methane that is leaking everywhere from well pads and compressor stations to pipelines that deliver gas to our homes has 84 times the warming potential of carbon in the first 20 years of its release into the atmosphere. It's a climate catastrophe in the making.

Pope Francis will address this issue head-on when he delivers his first major encyclical, on climate change, to the world's 1 billion Catholics this summer.

Why should we care about these competing story lines playing out at a safe distance from us? Because the narrative is changing quickly, now that pipelines carrying natural gas could soon be crisscrossing the state, a prime destination being a nascent energy hub in Philadelphia that would process and export the gas extracted from our land.

Of greatest concern to residents of the Lehigh Valley is the proposed 108-mile long PennEast pipeline, which would emanate from the northern end of the state and cross local communities on its way to Trenton, N.J. Along with that will come harmful impacts to our air, water and communities to which we have, so far, been largely immune, and we should be concerned about potential damage to vulnerable habitats and species.

The simple truth is that "voluntary standards" being proposed by natural gas drillers won't work. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette exposed this deception for what it is when it recently published a slew of photos obtained via the state's open records law that show countless violations at well sites, everything from "a puddle of fuel on fire" to workers "standing shin high in sludge as they clean out a pit where fluids leaked under a plastic barrier meant to protect the soil from contamination."

What Pennsylvania needs are strong rules to curb the harmful effects of this inherently industrial activity and the strict enforcement of same. The state Department of Environmental Protection is undertaking a process to review existing oil and gas regulations under Pa. Code Chapter 78 with an eye toward improvements, and has proposed a lengthy list of revisions.

Alongside this, Gov. Tom Wolf has expressed a desire to curb air emissions, including methane, the main component in natural gas. Methane's ability, coupled with other toxic air pollutants, to rapidly warm our atmosphere leads to increased ground-level ozone, or smog, a known contributor to asthma attacks and lung and heart disease. To say that climate change disproportionately affects those who are poor and infirm is a fact, and those of us who have pledged to help not just one group but all people are mindful of the urgent need to act.

It's clear that natural gas drillers are not going anywhere in Pennsylvania and will continue to ravage our natural resources, and hurt our citizens, with impunity unless we state plainly that they cannot. When Mr. Spigelmyer bemoans "operational disruption," it's easy to believe that the natural gas industry for which he lobbies is dead set against anything that could cut into the bottom line — even if lives are on the line.

A sensible first step for Pennsylvania to take is the direct regulation of methane emissions. Absent enforceable standards such as this, we are destined to live through yet another extractive industry that claimed it could be trusted to keep our air, water and land clean, yet turned around and plundered the landscape, leaving our children to pick up the scraps.